Omega point rak-2

by Guy Haley

  The ruined world changed piece by piece to a landscape of scrubby fields and the clouds cleared. The train passed close by rough dwellings, hugely tall with doors three times bigger than a man, their walls made of enormous boulders. Of the Jotens, there was no sign.

  The sun set. The sky above the train remained a pure lightblue for a time, and the men gambled at knucklebones until it was dark.

  Richards tried as best he could to get comfortable. He watched the alien sky. Away from the glare of Pylon City's sodium lamps, the stars twinkled brightly, competing with the sparks the train pumped into the night with its smoke.

  "A river of fire," said Tarquin sleepily. "It is a river of fire, and it is consuming the world."

  "That old hare's not the only poet on board, eh?" said Richards.

  "Mmf," said Tarquin.

  In the morning they woke to war.

  "Troopers!" A shout roused Richards from where he sat, bored, staring out over the plains. "Prepare to disembark!"

  "Now there's a man who enjoys his job," said Tarquin.

  "Jesus, he's worse than Otto," Richards said. His limbs cracked with unpleasant organic noises as he stood. He'd barely moved since he'd woken, and now felt as brittle as a straw doll. There was more to a human's constant, twitchy motion than staying upright, he was learning, like not letting their irritating meat outsides seize up.

  The soldiers hauled themselves from the trucks to join a stream of troops marching beside the tracks.

  "Right, my sleeping beauties," said the sergeant. "We are going to go for a walk. Word has come down to me that the line has been blown ahead by Penumbra's saboteurs. All you lot should think on how nice and healthy you'll be once you've walked. Who knows, there might even be time for a spot of breakfast before the war starts."

  "Really, sarge?" said an eager trooper.

  "No!" roared the sergeant. "Now get a bleedin' move on, or I'll shoot you myself and save Penumbra and his monsters the bother."

  Richards fell into step with something like a rat. It gave him a filthy look.

  "Charming," said Richards.

  The day was the kind autumn shares with summer: a cold morning with the promise of a hot afternoon. The sky was a uniform grey, its light joyless. Ahead it turned to an angry black, a thick band of deeper cloud foreshortening the horizon. Bursts of lightning lit it from within, thunder answered by tremors from below.

  "Look!" said the rat. "A storm!"

  "That's not a storm," said the hare with some amount of awe. "That is the death of the world. The Great Terror. I must record it in my poem."

  "Quiet in the ranks there! You can all have a natter after you've had a battle," bawled the sergeant. "Until then, keep your cakeholes shut."

  They walked five abreast alongside the railway embankment on a plain of grass that was almost completely flat. No farms, nor mines, only one small building, after the railway line curved west, red-brick, about a mile from the route of their march.

  "Last Station," said the hare. "From there the railway heads out to cross The Rift."

  A familiar odour percolated into the air. Burnt ground. The army took in the wasted land before them with a chorus of mutters and shouts.

  "Will this be the fortune of the Magic Wood?"

  "And the city?"

  There was an abrupt change in scenery, the plateau ending in a thick scar where two world fragments clumsily joined. Beyond it lay a plain criss-crossed with ravines and gullies, giving the landscape the look of an angular brain.

  It was scorched black. Charcoalled trees clawed at the sky, the gullies steamed, the grass was burnt down to the roots.

  "The broken lands, twice broken!" said the hare.

  The army marched onto the brow of the hill and fanned out, directed in columns to their positions. The centre of their battleline was a low blister in the slope. Commander Hedgehog and his best warriors had taken up station there. A mix of large forest animals armoured head to toe surrounded him and his staff. Behind this position were the army's artillery pieces, globular balls of crystal sporting long brass barrels. They looked spectacularly dangerous.

  "See!" whispered the hare from behind Richards. "Hedgehog has the men of the city at the heart of the army. He is guarded by the Big Animal Division and the City Guard. They have lightning lances, terrible weapons. I should expect we will be stationed out on one of the flanks, behind a skirmish line of lancers. When the enemy breaks through them, range will no longer matter, and we will be able to put our swords and spears to deadly use at close quarters!"

  The hare was mostly right. The Pylon Guard were few in number, so Richards' regiment was stationed behind a line of arbalesteers. These crossbowmen were not of Pylon City and wore colourful clothes at odds with the Pylonites' sober garb. Their forms were not so well rendered, their language a musical tongue he did not recognise. Protecting their right flank was a detachment of foundrymen. Further out roamed groups of skirmishers backed up by squadrons of light thog cavalry.

  "They'll stop anything getting round the back," the hare explained enthusiastically. "Or, when we break the enemy's line, force it apart like a wedge."

  "He's enjoying this far too much," muttered Richards to Tarquin.

  From behind came a rhythmic clatter: armoured weasels, well over a thousand of them, marching to fill the gap in the allied lines to Richards' left. They wore scale and plate, articulated to accommodate their sinuous bodies. Each carried a pike and a steel buckler with a spiked boss. Blood-red pennants fluttered from helmets and shields and streamed from the ends of their pikes.

  "Aren't they glorious?" whispered the hare in awe.

  Richards raised an eyebrow. "Don't weasels eat hares?"

  "They do indeed," said the hare, nodding, not rising to the bait. "And I know I should not admire them, for a pack of them did devour a sister of mine. But still, all that is behind us now, now we are part of the League of Humans and Small but Brave Animals!"

  "Snappy," said Richards.

  "How could we fail to lose with such ferocious beings at our sides? A thousand armoured weasels, each a born killer. Glorious!"

  "Yeah," said Richards slowly, remembering their behaviour in the bar. "And each a born weasel."

  Richards had time to re-experience the boredom part of the boredom and terror warfare combination. They stood in their position for several hours, and once again he became uncomfortable. He was debating taking a piss right there when the hare spoke again.

  "Oh my!" said the hare. "Here they come!"

  The sky went dark. A hush came over the army of men and beasts. The enemy approached. Shadow preceded it, and darkness followed.

  The horde of creatures came from the south, appearing over a ridge three miles away, drawing toward them with unnatural speed.

  "Oh my," said the hare with a tinge of fear. "There are rather a lot of them."

  In the main the army was composed of vile-looking humanoids. Like the alliance, monsters brought from all manner of places on the Grid.

  "Every hero needs his mob," said Richards grimly, doing a quick calculation on the balance between heroic human players and system-controlled monsters in your average game. The odds he came up with were unfavourable. Not for the first time he wondered how the hell he'd ended up in this mess, and decided to blame Hughie.

  Steam curled from haemites. Immense war-beasts studded the horde like rocks on a polluted beach. Steam-powered towers, bristling with cannon, crawled across the broken lands on caterpillar tracks. Around these marched monstrous trollmen, swishing tree-trunk clubs as they walked.

  "Look!" said the hare, his lips wobbling with fear. "Morblins! There… there must be over five thousand of them! And daibeasts. And, by lord Frith, that is a low-dweller. A low-dweller!" An unpleasant chant filled the air, a droning that made Richards' skin crawl. An oily reek descended across the battlefield, the exhaust of engines, steam, the stink of unwashed bodies.

  Nearby, one of the soldiers began to cry.

  "Shut i
t, you," said the sergeant. There was a tremor in his voice.

  The front rank of what Richards took to be morblins, small, pot-bellied, grey-skinned creatures, had a great many armoured hounds amidst it. The largest morblins held onto the leashes of these dogs, who half-dragged them towards the allied lines.

  The enemy stopped, facing off against the league.

  Silence fell. Thunder rumbled. Pennants cracked in the wind.

  Then a howl as the dogs were set loose. They rushed across the plains, baying.

  "Steady, Richards, steady," Richards told himself. The rush of fear his human facsimile provided him was powerful.

  "Keep your spear up, Richards, don't lose your head. Should anything get through I'll shift to stone," said Tarquin urgently. "Just remember you won't be quite so nimble when I do. Keep that in mind, dear boy, and it'll all be tickety-boo. You'll see."

  "I don't see why we can't just fuck off," Richards said.

  The commander of the arbalesteers shouted, and the first rank readied themselves. Two hundred heavy crossbows clicked into place on their tripods. They waited, their arms steady, their gaze unwavering. The commander held his arm. The hounds came on.

  "Company!" called Richards' sergeant. "Present pikes!" Richards cursed his quaking limbs as he fumbled his spear into place.

  "This is where it all begins my friend," said the hare behind Richards. "Wish me luck."

  The arbalesteer captain dropped his arm, and the world dissolved into violence.

  Two hundred barbed quarrels sped unerringly. The yelps of two hundred dogs filled the air.

  A shout went up from the morblins, and they broke into a run towards the allied lines, the trollmen beside them, the ground thundering as they came. The air crackled with electricity as the lancers of Pylon City discharged their weaponry into the front of the horde. Hundreds fell, burnt and writhing, but there were thousands behind. The lancemen parted ranks, and with a mighty squeak a horde of vole mercenaries, the vanguard of the League of Brave but Small Animals, hurled themselves through the gap towards the approaching morblins. There was a crash as the lines connected.

  The lancemen reformed smoothly and pumped bolt after bolt of cerulean energy into the rear ranks of the horde, picking out the larger creatures as the valiant voles held back the enemy. By Richards the foreign crossbowmen fired by rank an endless rain of quarrels. The dead of the enemy tumbled in heaps.

  The enemy artillery opened up. Shells whistled overhead from the tracked towers of Penumbra. Dozens of shells slammed into the packed lines of men and animals. Screams filled the air. Earth and blood fountained skywards and body parts rained down. Groups of the more timid animals looked close to dissolving into panic.

  "Eyes front, soldier!" shouted the sergeant at Richards.

  The allied guns replied. Heavy lightning burned through the air, leaving glowing after-images and a sharp smell. Iron towers burst into flame and stopped in their tracks. One carried on moving forward, a track blown clean off. It heeled over ponderously, and crashed down, crushing hundreds of its own side. The allied lightning cannon raked bloody furrows in the horde, but their numbers seemed inexhaustible.

  The arbalesteers kept firing as the enemy closed, ignoring the desperate fights of their comrades with the surviving warhounds. The corpses of morblins and trollmen lay five deep. The enemy were so numerous that they kept on coming, fifty metres away, then thirty, then twenty. The arbalesteers shot until they were on top of them. Richards saw one go down screaming under a haemite, his body sucked dry. More haemites followed, and the sounds of blades on metal bodies rang out across the field as the arbalesteers abandoned their crossbows and drew their short swords.

  "Steady, lads!" barked the sergeant. "Here they come!"

  The earth shook under the weight of charging trollmen. The line of arbalesteers bent backwards, wavered and broke. The enemy surged through in one and twos and then by the dozen. They flung themselves at the line of men, flattening many. Richards' arm juddered as a bellowing creature impaled itself on his spear.

  "Watch out!" roared the lion. Richards jumped back as another trollman swung at him, leaving his spear in the guts of his toppling foe. He ducked a hammer blow, narrowly keeping his footing. The trollman readied his weapon for another strike. Richards had nowhere to go, hemmed in by the dead and those desperate not to be. A blast of lightning felled the trollman, leaving Richards gasping. Limbs and blades whirled around him.

  A morblin cannoned into him, clawing and biting. He wrestled with it a while, but it was as weak as its fat body suggested, and he managed to snatch out his sword and despatch it. Richards looked at his sword, slick and treacherous in his hands, then at the creatures from innumerable virt-games warring in deadly earnest all around him, the violent deaths of scores of talking animals and gaming cliches.

  "This is fucking ridiculous!" shouted Richards.

  The world disappeared behind a sheet of white. Richards stumbled, blood in his eyes, hearing gone. He blinked and found himself in a lull in the fighting.

  Bodies lay all about. A ruddy crater garnished with the limbs of friend and foe occupied the space where the centre of his regiment had been. A lucky few stood blinking, covered in blood. They stared at one another, shocked, lost between surprise and relief.

  Richards staggered in a rough circle, his head spinning. Shouting, loud and frantic, impinged on the ringing in his ears. Away to his right, a knot of surprised troops yelled as the weasels attacked them from behind.

  Richards wiped the blood of his comrades from his face. His head cleared. "I've got to get out of here," he said, and cast about for a means of escape.

  A paw grabbed him from behind, spinning him round. The lame hare, one of his ears a tatter.

  "Where are you going? Fleeing is the blackest treason…"

  "I…" said Richards.

  The hare held up a hand to remonstrate. It was the last thing it ever did. A cannonball whistled by, a gust of hard wind stirring Richards' hair. It removed the hare's head neatly. Blood fountained from its neck, splattering Richards, and the hare folded onto its lame leg like a collapsible chair.

  Richards stumbled back, caught sight of a stray thog and ran for it. He grabbed its reins and swung atop. It lowed angrily and stamped its six legs, but held fast. He tugged on its reins, dragging its head around, and the animal performed a tight circle.

  Fighting raged all about. There was no way out.

  "Dammit! What do we do now?"

  "Let's get to the centre, tell the hedgehog. We'll better be able to be on our way if they win," said Tarquin.

  Richards debated the lion's suggestion with himself. He spun the mount round again. There was little chance he'd get off the field intact, not with the weasels butchering their way through their own side all around him. "OK," he said, "OK." He kicked with his heels, and the thog took off.

  Shells exploded to the left of Richards, to the right of him, reducing the battle to a series of violent tableaux, surging into view and then lost in veils of gunsmoke and sheets of earth.

  Three half-naked anime heroines tackled a trollman, baiting it with spears. A band of otters in lab coats tackled a purple octopus covered in smilies. Men rolled in the dirt with morblins, dodging the thrusts of filthy knives. Haemites fed on friend and foe alike, their whistles an industrial dirge. Here and there disciplined pockets of men and beasts formed tight groups, spearpoint and blade keeping the Penumbra's minions at bay. But every enemy felled was replaced by four more. Gone were the proud ranks; the field writhed with small and personal wars, all thoughts of strategy obscured by blood and sweat and terror. Creatures came at Richards to fall to his sword or bounce from the flanks of the six-legged cow, their cries snatched away by speed and steel.

  "Nearly there!" yelled Richards.

  Tarquin turned to stone and saved Richards from a spearpoint. "We're not out of the woods yet."

  Richards hammered toward the centre, where the disciplined corps of hedgehogs stood firm. Heav
ily armoured in burnished steel, they surrounded the Lord High Commander's command post, an enormous tortoise with "Roger" written in childish script on its shell.

  Atop Roger was a howdah of metal. Telescopes and small lightning cannon were fixed to the rails. One gunner lay dead in the harness of his shattered weapon, but the others trained theirs still upon the enemy, spikes of electricity writhing periodically through the air. In front of the howdah, on a seat on the lip of Roger's shell, sat another hedgehog holding a set of metal reins. It flicked a whip about the tortoise's head. Roger seemed unperturbed. Through his helm's eye-slits, he pondered the bloodbath with the slow bemusement with which tortoises regard the world.

  "Lord High Commander Hedgehog!" yelled Richards, leaping off the thog. He bounded up the low steps to the howdah, and was promptly accosted by two burly hedgehogs.

  "Who are you?" growled one.

  "Some kind of assassin," said the other. Blades scraped as they drew out their daggers.

  "I have urgent news for the Lord High Commander," insisted Richards.

  "No one allowed up here but general staff," yelled the hedgehog over the noise of an exploding shell. "Push off!"

  "Let him through, let him through," said the diffident voice of Hedgehog. "I will see him." The bodyguards stepped aside, and Richards was afforded a view of the Lord High Commander. His visor was up, since he had been conferring with his aides, and as Richards approached he snapped shut an elegant telescope. "Well?" said Hedgehog. "What is it, human? Speak, then be gone."

  "The weasels, the weasels have turned!"

  "I see," said Hedgehog, his voice several degrees cooler. "They are rolling up the right flank?"

  "Right now."

  "No doubt you think I should act. But I won't," said Lord High Commander Hedgehog. "The weasels, you see, work for me."

  "Ah."

  "'Ah' indeed. Those short-sighted fools in Pylon City could not see the advantage to be had from forming an alliance with Penumbra. Though we argued the case with them, they would not favour the idea. Penumbra was more than happy to entertain our unilateral offer. The Pylonites will die. Our aeons-long struggle with Pylon City will be over, and the Magic Wood will survive the Great Terror, forever free of the tyranny of men and their machines!"